Hello Hat Lovers!

As I’m sure you’ve seen the VGC 2016 ruleset has been announced. The rules are the same as last year except now we get to use two of the following on our team: Mewtwo, Lugia, Ho-Oh, Kyogre, Groudon, Rayquaza, Dialga, Palkia, Giratina, Reshiram, Zekrom, Kyurem, Xerneas, Yveltal, Zygarde. 

This format is effectively VGC 2010 on steroids, what with Primals, Mega evolutions, and a greater diversity of Legendaries and powerful Pokemon. Here are some first impressions from the VGC w/Hats crew: (more…)

Hello Hat Lovers!

Today it was announced that US Nationals will have best-of-3 matches for day one swiss. In the past Bo3 play has been reserved for top cut, as well as day 2 of Nationals and Worlds swiss. Making note of the change is very important as it changes what kind of game we’re playing on day 1.

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Hello Hat Lovers!

Mark and I have been working on a VGC draft format over the last year, and recently we held our first draft tournament.

Last year before Nationals I built a deck of TCG cards that featured all the common Pokemon from the VGC 2014 metagame. At Nationals I would hand out six random cards to people and tell them that was their team. We would look at what everyone got and see who had the most legitimate looking team to try and play with.

We later tried to make a game out of this where everyone is given their team at random and everyone tries to argue why their team is better than the rest. These attempts often collapsed into a black hole of biased theory-mon and didn’t end up being satisfying. The was no accounting for player skill or RNG so it was impossible to determine which team would win. We decided that the only way to salvage this game was to make the players make their team after getting the cards and actually playing a game.

At long last we finally made a format for VGC drafting. Here are the steps for drafting:

• Gather all players in a circle and give them each eight random cards from the deck
• Each player takes one card for themselves and passes the remaining cards to the player on the left
• Repeat the last step with the cards passed to you until everyone has eight cards
• Every player is given twenty minutes to build their team on Showdown using the six of the eight Pokemon they drafted.

As an example of what you can expect, here’s what I drafted:

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Hello Hat Lovers!

Nugget Bridge has compiled a list of teams that made top cut in the Spring Regionals (you can find that list here). I took a tally of how often each Pokemon showed up on a top cut team (Click here to view the list) and I’m going to look at this data and see what it says about the metagame heading into Nationals.

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Hey there Hat Lovers,

Today’s article will be a topic that I think confuses many people (including myself). You hear a lot of players talk about the momentum of a game, saying things like “I was able to take back the momentum” or “I couldn’t stop their momentum.” But what is momentum? If you asked people this, I’m sure they could answer, but it might come out a bit rambly and unfocused. I only really got a clear idea of how to convey momentum thanks to my experience with the TCG, where the game is highly predictable turn after turn. So today’s post is short and sweet. I’m going to put forth a definition for momentum, and discuss how it can change through the game. After that, I really just want to hear back from you guys, the readers, about whether you think I’ve hit the nail on the head or if my definition needs adjustments. Here goes:

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